Over the weekend, 5,500 young activists gathered outside D.C. to rally action on climate change at the Power Shift summit. The three-day event, hosted by the Energy Action Coalition, drew together youth from around the country to discuss climate and energy issues, and to empower them to get out the vote back home and mobilize other young adults around climate change. If Tom Friedman really thinks we're "Generation Quiet," he hasn't heard much about this group.
The 5,500 young people, some college students, some post-college, some still in high school, created what most are positing as the biggest event on climate and energy to date. They arrived in Maryland by the droves, ready to combine old-school activism with some new-school innovation. Their action will start today, with several thousand of the people who took part in the summit heading to the hill to talk to their representatives about climate and energy. They are asking for action to help us cut our energy use at least 20 percent by 2015 through conservation, investment in programs to create 5 million new green jobs, and emissions cuts of 30 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. They're also asking legislators to end subsidies and advantages for things like fossil fuels and highways and start supporting clean energy and sound transportation options, and they'd like to see an immediate moratorium on coal-fired power plants.
Participants will also be carrying the message back to their campuses and communities, encouraging other young people to come out and vote for candidates with solid climate and energy plans. Voter registration among 18-29-year-olds hit its highest level in three decades in 2004, and organizers are hoping to top that in 2008. In this generation of voters, 47 percent have said that they vote for candidates at least in part based on their climate and energy stance. These are issues will probably be much more important for young voters than they are for older voters, and to date, they haven't been very central to the debate among presidential candidates. The young people who met here this weekend have made it their top priority to change that.
For more on the weekend and today's lobbying, check out It's Getting Hot In Here.
--Kate Sheppard
